"The art of the theater is ... an art that can never dissolve its
reliance on the scale of the human figure, the sound of the human
voice, and the disposition of mankind to tell each other stories,"
says Sir Richard Eyre in Changing Stages, the book he wrote to
accompany the six-part series on PBS (Sundays, Aug. 26, 9-11 p.m.,
check local listings).

He remarks that it is as absurd to represent a stage performance
on TV as it is to put a ventriloquist on the radio - but he does it
anyway. And a good job it is. "Changing Stages" is a rough-hewn
history of 20th-century theater in England and the United States -
as a professional director and manager sees it.

The relationship between British (including Irish) and American
theater is clear enough. There's not only the language base, but
also a common set of religious and social idioms. But you can't
talk about British and American theater without talking about
Shakespeare - it's just not possible. Shakespeare gave us modern
theater, so the first hour is devoted to him. And Eyre makes the
point that it's a good thing we don't know much about the man,
because then he would be subject to all kinds of irrelevant
analysis. Yet oceans of prose have swept over the works of
Shakespeare, and every production of one of his plays reflects the
age in which it is produced.

Later, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Miller,
Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, John Osborne,
and George Bernard Shaw, among others, changed the world of theater
again and again. Yet theater is both fleeting and human-scaled -
unlike either the movies (bigger than life) or TV (smaller).

"A theater performance cannot be stored or recorded. It is live
and unrepeatable, ephemeral even at its very greatest, melting away
after the event like a snowman in the sun," Mr. Eyre writes.

In a recent interview, he talked about the very air of the
theater as being charged with the audience's participation:
"Because a group, a collective, is united by their enjoyment -
that's when you know the theater works."

But theater audiences are less forgiving than film or TV
audiences. No one says film is dead if they see a few bad movies.
But pundits have been declaring the theater dead since film took on
sound.

In the series, and in person, Eyre addresses the problem of the
apparent "apartheid" of audiences - between those who can afford to
go to the theater and those who cannot. His solution is publicly
funded theater, which his colleague Julie Taymor (designer and
director of "The Lion King") encourages as well.

"Reduce the seat prices," they both say. "Subsidy also allows
continuity," says Eyre. "Subsidy nurtures the art form - allows
artists to experiment and even to fail. There are important little
theater groups working with very little money.... If you had a
system of public funding, you would have more important plays."

But art does depend on genius, say both Eyre and Taymor. …

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